Teacher Appreciation Week and Teachers Pay Teachers Sale!

Today marks the beginning of May.  For some, that means that Spring is in full swing, the birds and bees are out doing their thing, the weather is nice, plants are starting to peek their leaves out, and the pollen is in full force.  For me, it means that I am coming ever closer to the end of the school year and all of the work that brings with it.  I have grades to enter, assessments to give, paperwork to file, certificates to create, 5th grade promotion to run, one more concert to put on, etc. etc. etc.  The end of the school year always becomes a mad dash to the finish to try and squeeze everything in.

One of the best parts, though, is that the beginning of May also brings Teacher Appreciation Week.  This is a fantastic time around my school, as the PTA comes up with a lot of very thoughtful ways to show how much they appreciate the teachers in our building.  Usually we have lunch provided (and sometimes breakfast) most of the week, a few odds and ends that show up in our mailboxes, and the occasional note from a student or several.  These are all fantastic ways to re-energize to the end of the school year.

It's always good to feel appreciated.  Especially at the end of state-mandated testing (which may prove to be the death of me).

On top of the Teacher Appreciation activities at individual schools around the country, TeachersPayTeachers is offering a site-wide sale!  This is always a good thing.  On top of their discount, I will be offering every item in my store at a 20% discount.  That means you can get anything in my store for a combined total of 28% off!

What could be better than that?

Well, in celebration of a milestone for me (I just checked, and I have 40 products available!), I am going to offer an extra day of sale immediately following the TpT sale.  The official site-wide sale will run May 5-6.  My sale will by May 7, and will be a 20% off sale on the entire store.

I highly recommend if you've been looking for Boomwhacker activities that you check out my Boomwhacker Bundle, this will be a fantastic chance to get it at a great price.  Also, if you purchase it now and I update it to include more in the future, you'll get all of the new material for FREE!

I don't know about you, but I like free.

Ok, that's enough of the sales pitch.  I hope you have a fantastic conclusion to your school year, and I'll be back with actual educational writing soon!

TeachersPayTeachers Sale Extended!

Good snowy morning!

Ok, I'll admit it, I am NOT thrilled about the snow that is currently falling outside.  Partly because I need clear part of my roof to avoid making the leak worse that I discovered during the last snow melt.  But mostly because we were just getting back to having everyone back into the routines of school.  Things were finally getting back to normal, projects were underway, learning was happening.... And now... more snow.

Sigh.

But there is a bright side to today.  TeachersPayTeachers has extended their Teachers Are Heroes sale another day.  They are offering up to 28% off sitewide for an extra day!

Thankfully, teachers are the kind of hero that doesn't wear tights.  Well, mostly.

For me, that means that you can snag absolutely everything in my store for 28% off using the discount code HEROES at checkout.  Want to save almost $3 on music education resources?  Try the Great Big Boomwhacker and Orff Collection!  Looking for some beginning band arrangments?  How about Chameleon or Kookaburra?  You could also go straight to my storefront and browse the items that are on sale for less than a dollar! 

So hopefully this TpT sale will help keep you warm on a snowy Winter's day.  And fingers are crossed that the snow stops soon and melts this afternoon and we're back on track tomorrow. (A teacher can hope, right?)

Teachers Pay Teachers Sale!

Greetings!  I just wanted to make sure anyone and everyone knows about the upcoming TeachersPayTeachers sale - Teachers are Heroes!

On Wednesday, February 25th, everything sitewide is going to be 10% off using promo code HEROES, and many stores will be an additional discount up to 20%.  My store is going to be 20% every item, so by combining the two discounts you can save 28% on anything I have listed.  This is a great opportunity if you're looking at possibly purchasing any of my Boomwhacker resources or beginning band or orchestra arrangements.  Those are the most expensive items in my store, so this is a great chance to scoop them up at a discount.  Here are direct links to each item:

Boomwhackers Introduction Powerpoint

Mary Had a Little Lamb Boomwhacker

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1 with Heart Beats

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1 with Notation

Boomwhacker Song Collection #2 (Pentatonic Songs)

Great Big Boomwhacker Collection

Orff Instrument Bar Labels with Boomwhacker Colors

Big Rock Candy Mountain for Violin

Chameleon for Elementary Band

Kookaburra for Elementary Band


Alternately, you can click the link below to go directly to my storefront:

Have a great week, everyone!

Composition! Or, The Colors, Man, The Colors!

Greetings, internet!

I really am trying to be better about regularly posting, but it is a struggle.  It's funny how working three jobs gets in the way of writing blog posts.  And by funny I mean causes ridiculous amounts of angst.  I was reminded recently of just how much I'm not at home when I looked around the house and counted the number of projects that still need finishing.  I spent most of my Sunday afternoon cleaning up our rabbit cage because it had gotten nasty, a direct result of me not being home enough to keep up with it.

But I digress.

I assume you're here for a post about music education, right?  After all, this is The Mobile Music Mansion, not Mr. Earley's Dysfunctional Rabbit Farm.

AWEEEEEEOWEEOOWEOMUMBAWAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY......

So here we go.

I have gotten back into using a resource that I had created last year - the Boomwhackers Song Collections.  There are currently two available on my Teachers Pay Teachers store

(Collection 1 and Collection 2), and I am working on some new ones.  If you haven't clicked over to see what those activities are about, I'll give you a brief rundown.  Essentially I started using squares and rectangles that were color coded to match the Boomwhacker colors as a means of introducing notation to my youngest students.  I am not a fan of using the little pictograph representations of notes, since I've never seen music notated with smiling bees or anthropomorphic suns and hearts and stars.  Instead, I wanted to use something that would make a logical sequence of reading left to right, grouping by beat, and applying what is read to the instruments at hand.  This works great with Boomwhackers, and even better when scaffolded into Orff instruments.  All of my barred instruments have color coded labels to match the Boomwhackers as well, and students can make a logical transition to playing those instruments after a little time spent practicing on the Boomwhackers.  This can then lead to using traditional notation with colored note heads, and then purely traditional notation.  I am still in the development stages of this plan, so there is a long way to go with implementing this and seeing/measuring the results, but I have high hopes.

Some day I hope to have matching mallets for each instrument

I'm starting to think that maybe I need to spend some more time with Kindergarten and first grade earlier on in the school year to develop the sense of steady beat and tracking the beat while listening.  This is something that my students frequently struggle with, and is at least partly (stereotype warning!) a result of having middle-class Caucasian students forming the bulk of the student body.  These are kids who don't grow up experiencing music as something that they do, but instead as something that exists beyond them, perhaps on a shelf only to be taken out on days they have music class.  I want to move my students to a place where music is part of their everyday life and expression, something that they do without thinking, without hesitating, and without fear of whether it is "good enough."  (I think of this as the "American Idol Phenomenon" - what if we grew up thinking that we weren't good enough because some celebrity judge said we weren't any good?  What  complex to create in young people. But that is another rant for another time,)

Simon says that was the worst improvised ostinato he's ever heard paired with Mary Had a Little Lamb.  You should just stop.

The more students are experiencing music in a hands-on, applied, real sense, the more it becomes a part of who they are.  My goal is to foster that as much as I can in as many students as I can.  It kills me to hear students talk about music like it's some mystery.  Music is all around us, music is a part of what makes us human.

If I can use a bunch of colored rectangles and squares to help reinforce that integral musical part of all of us, I am 100% in.

So then what's next?

Well, in my view that would be composition.  But gone are the days when I would just hand out staff paper to my oldest students and have them write meaningless combinations of notes.  I have been working with students creating ostinatos, which has been nice, but let's go several steps further.  What if students were creating something that had meaning to them, as well as its own musical meaning?  By all means, let's do it!

So I give you color coded composition.  Also, alliteration.  :)

What I am trying now is to have students use construction paper cut to the same relative sizes as the squares and rectangles in the Boomwhacker Song Collections.  I spent a little time working out the measurements I could use, then cut them out of red, orange, yellow, dark green, and purple paper, thus making a C pentatonic scale.  At first I am planning to introduce the concept by giving students a few pieces to work with and having them see what they can come up with.  No rules - anarchy in the music room!  We will arrange the pieces and then perform them for the class, discussing what we hear.  Then, I plan to given a worksheet/template to each student giving some guidelines - mostly beat groupings (hello, time signatures!), but also reinforcing Do as the tonic note.

With my youngest students, it will just be practice to get used to the idea of organizing notes by how they sound, reinforcing Do, and getting to use the Boomwhackers and Orff instruments to create music.

For my second graders, I hope to have them really apply their knowledge of staff notation and transfer what they have done by color onto the treble staff, thus creating true compositions that they can give to anyone and have it played.

Long term, I hope to never again have a student look at a piece of music then look at me and say "I can't read this."

Fingers are crossed.

I'll keep you posted!

The importance of making things interesting

I don't know about you, but I like things that are a little out of the ordinary.  Mind you, that doesn't mean I want everything to be weird or cantankerous or obscure (take that, hipsters!).  Instead, I just like things that work a little differently than is sometimes the norm.

For example: I have a penchant for barbecue.  Not just some meat in a restaurant slathered in sauce, but real, slow-cooked, smoky, well-seasoned meat that has been tended to over a bed of hot coals for many hours.  This is different than the norm these days in that people don't often like to spend hours in preparing a single food item.  But it is worth it in the end.  It's also nice to come in the house smelling like woodsmoke and meat, knowing that I have been playing with fire for the most delicious result imaginable.  Also, each time I make barbecue it's a little different.  No matter how hard I try, I can never perfectly replicate the previous result.

Smells like.... Victory!

Another example: My own personal style is... somewhat rustic, I suppose.  I like to wear things that are both comfortable and functional, but that look acceptable for their purpose.  This has resulted in showing up to Halloween parties dressed as a lumberjack or some other outdoors enthusiast and having people ask why I wasn't wearing a costume.  But I digress.

I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay.

Part of the attraction of these things, to me, is that they are interesting in some way.  They are interesting partly because they are different.  Not what you would expect.  Not what you see every day.

"But how," you may be asking, "does this relate to teaching?"

The answer is quite simple.  Things that are out of the ordinary - striking, different, novel, however you want to say it - attract more attention in the learning process.  Our brains are wired to accept new input, categorize it, file it away for later retrieval, and expend minimal effort in recognizing it in the future.  Have you ever walked past a painting on the wall so many times you forgot it was there - only to realize some time later that it had been replaced with something else?  This is just part of how the human mind works.  We don't want to spend a lot of energy or effort on noticing the same things over and over again.  This helps us cope with the incredible amount of stimuli that exist as part of our every day lives.  We would be quite overwhelmed if we took notice of every single speck of everything that we encounter regularly.  There's just too much.

"But how," you may be asking, "does this relate to music education?"

Again, quite simple.  One of the most difficult things to teach students is to make things interesting and novel even when they are practicing the most mundane, uninteresting, boring aspects of music.  It's why I have as many different acronyms for teaching lines and spaces of the staff as I possibly can remember.  It's why I like to ask students to tell me what they think after something goes horribly wrong - or wonderfully right.  It's why sometimes a band director will switch around seating and do something ridiculous - like putting the trumpets in the front row. (Another great Tone Deaf Comics moment!)

When things are different, we pay attention to them differently.  Our brains are always (ok, usually) more responsive to new things than they are to things that are well-worn and habitual.  Music teachers (and teachers in general) take advantage of this frequently, if for no better reason than to keep their students from griping about being bored (side note - I couldn't tell you the last time I had the luxury of being bored.  Seems like there is always something that must be done.  Must be one more curse of growing up.).

I would like to share with you the revelation I had about a week ago (actually, I had it several years ago but forgot until just last week).  When you practice on your own, do you use a metronome?  If you teach music, do you use a metronome in class or in lessons?  Personally, I can't imagine life without a metronome.  It's as fundamental to music as sound itself.  The division of time into perfectly regularly spaced pulses is not something that comes easily to many of us.  We need something to keep us on target, and something to get irritated with when we are playing in perfect time and that infernal machine is OBVIOUSLY SPEEDING UP. (John Bogenschutz sums it up perfectly in his Tone Deaf Comics found here.)

So what do you do to teach kids that a metronome is so important?  "But Mr. Earley," I can hear my students saying, "it's just an annoying noise that won't stop and gets boring (there's that word again!!!)."

Hmmm... They may have a point there.  The sound of a metronome does become rather monotonous after a while, and if you're not focused on keeping 100% with the metronome pulse it can become white noise and ignored rather quickly.

A view of the metronome being ignored.
Also, how it feels when your foot falls asleep.

One approach I have tried with a general music class is to play some sort of percussion instrument.  Conga, Bongos, Djembe, drum set, you name it, I've tried it.  This usually leads to kids complaining that they want to try it.  Or worse, ignoring it just like the metronome.  The most reliable of these has always been the drum set, but there are two fundamental problems with it. First, I am not a terribly gifted drum set player.  Second, it only works if I am behind it, and this keeps me from being able to move around the room.  What good is a means of keeping tempo if I can't actively adjust/fix things?

If I can't get out of here, I might as well get comfortable...

Hmmm... So what I need is something that works more or less like the drum set, can keep a perfectly steady tempo, is interesting to listen to, and lets me move around as needed....

Bingo. (Cue novel approach fanfare!)

What I have found is that by using audio software and a loop library, I can metronome the heck out of anything, yet still make it fresh and interesting for the students.  Heck, it makes it more enjoyable for me, too!  I use Acoustica Mixcraft (because I am not an Apple fanboy), which is essentially the Windows equivalent of GarageBand (what I would use if I were an Apple fanboy).  This is a fairly straightfoward digital audio workstation (DAW) that includes, among other things, a fairly impressive loop library.  By searching for a drum groove, I found one that I liked - it's straightforward, only slightly syncopated, clear enough to follow, and outlines two measures.  I took that and expanded it to three minutes in length.  Then I added a chime sound (which sounds suspiciously like something from Super Mario Brothers) to indicate when each minute passes.  For kicks, I added a short chime riff to the end to indicate that time was up (I may go back and make this the "game over" sound from Mario - we'll see...).  I can now use this to not only keep my groups on track with tempo, but also to manage my own time in the classroom.

What I love about this approach is that it is interesting and novel enough on its own that as soon as I start the track, I can see the kids wiggling and moving to the beat in their seats.  No instruction needed, just pure interest.

The next step was to expand the track so I could have one that was 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes, and 10 minutes in length.  This way I don't have to just play a recording on endless loop - I can pick whichever length fits the activity and time remaining.  Furthermore, it is versatile enough to use for an extremely wide variety of activities.  I have used it with second grade playing mallet and rhythm instruments, first grade and kindergarten playing Boomwhackers , even the older students in band and strings when doing exercises and scales.  What's more is that if we get to where this particular track gets stale or loses its novelty, I can go back to Mixcraft and make a new one that sounds completely different with minimal effort.

Now, I understand that not everyone is in love with loops and creating audio tools the way that I am.  If you'd like, you can visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store and pick up the audio tracks I created, either individually or as a bundle of all four lengths.  The length is the only difference between them. They are done as mp3 files, so you don't need to worry about having a particular piece of software to make them work.  If you use them, please feel free to leave a comment here and/or a comment on TpT.

I plan to keep making things like these rhythm tracks to keep everything as novel and interesting as I can.  I also would love to hear from you - what do you do to keep things interesting in the classroom?  Do you have a particular approach/trick/product that you use?  Do you have a particular group/student that needs more novelty than you can keep up with?  I welcome your comments below!

Boomwhackers!

You may know (or you may not) that I love Boomwhackers. Better yet, students of all ages love Boomwhackers.  If you have not yet had the joy of seeing or playing them, I will describe briefly.  Each Boomwhacker is a colored plastic tube cut to a specific length.  This allows them to be pitched, and each tube is marked with the pitch it plays, as well as the solfege syllable associated with it (assuming you are using fixed do).  They come in various sets, though the most common set is the standard one-octave diatonic set in C Major.

There are tons of Boomwhacker resources available, some free, some surprisingly expensive.  The neat thing about them though is that you do not need any extra materials.  The tubes can be used with many resources you already have.  Sometimes the best thing to do is to provide no resources and just let the kids explore!

Granted, there is always a need to establish procedures and expectations (Boomwhackers must be held like.... Boomwhackers may not touch your neighbor/other items in the room/small animals... Do not treat them like you are performing martial arts... etc.)  but within reason they are tough enough to stand up to class after class of use.

One of my favorite things to do is to show how one person can play an entire song with a set, and then how we can play the same song as a class with each person responsible for one note.  I usually do this with simple songs like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star or Mary Had a Little Lamb.  Kids can get pretty excited over a discovery that they can all be part of making the music together (though a few get disgruntled - "Why does red get all of the notes? I'm playing pink and I only got to play once!"  I'm fairly certain these kids will never be happy with what I give them, so I just try to make sure no one kid is stuck with one color all the time).

A while back I created a Powerpoint to help introduce my students to the Boomwhackers.  The goal was to establish my own procedures as well as get them comfortable with using the tubes properly, waiting their turn, following the directions for when to play, etc.  You can find that Powerpoint in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

This school year, I decided I would take that idea one step further.  I created a Powerpoint for Mary Had a Little Lamb using the same process - one color per slide, advance through the slides steadily to get the kids to play the tubes in the right order.  This led to a realization of a problem.  Even if I am advancing the slides to a steady beat, there was no cue to get the kids to play on the beat. I had to go through it a lot to get to a point where they knew what came next in order to have some semblance of beat.

This just wouldn't do.

Instead, I created a system of "notation" that uses colored squares and rectangles to indicate which tube plays and for how long.  It allows the kids to look ahead at what's coming, and seems to do a great job of prepping them to move into regular notation.  It also has the side benefit of not being a cutesy picture of some clipart bumblebee and heart and sun in place of real notes.  I am not a fan of those.   I created a song collection using this method of progressively arranged tunes.  You can find that collection here.  It includes the songs Hot Cross Buns, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Clair de Lune, Go Tell Aunt Rhody, Frere Jacques, London Bridge, and Old MacDonald.  Each song takes up one slide, and is readily approachable by even the youngest of elementary students.

My goal is to create a series of song collections, and then offer them all bundled together at a discount.

If you have another way of using Boomwhackers please feel free to leave a comment.  Even better would be if you use my Powerpoints let me know how you used them and how it went!